The Khronos Group - a non-profit industry consortium to develop, publish and promote open standard, royalty-free media authoring and acceleration standards for desktop and handheld devices, combined with conformance qualification programs for platform and device interoperability.

Following the meetings in Taipei and Hsinchu in February2012, the Khronos Group will once again return to Taiwan in early June. Visiting the National Taiwan University and National Tsing Hua University, Khronos will hold a series of public educational activities and business meetings. In order to further communication and interaction with local Taiwanese businesses, the meetings will be open to the public. The Khronos Group will have a lot of exciting information to discuss and is looking forward to the enthusiastic participation of the Pan-Pacific region.

There will be five courses offered at Siggraph 2012 that relate to Khronos Technologies. Starting on August 5th followed by one course each day, there will be "Introduction to Modern OpenGL", "Virtual Texturing in Software and Hardware", "Beyond Programmable Shading", "GPU Shaders for OpenGL 4.x" and finally on August 9th "Graphics Programming for the Web." See all Khronos related events at Siggraph 2012 on the Khronos Group Siggraph event page.

Introduction to Modern OpenGL is an introductory course which offers an overview of the complete OpenGL pipeline, introducing all the latest shader stages. Other topics introduced are the shader-based pipeline, and a summary of key graphics concepts: the synthetic-camera model, transformations, viewing, and lighting. The instructors are Edward Angel, University of New Mexico and Dave Shreiner from ARM. Dave Shriener is co-author of the OpenGL® Programming Guide

Mikael Bourges-Sevenier has sent in three WebGL and WebCL modules that he’s written for Node. node-webcl from Motorola Mobility is an implementation of the Khronos WebCL working draft using Node. node-webgl is an implementation of the Khronos WebGL specification. node-glfw is a JavaScript wrapper around GLFW. This provides implementations, where possible, of WebGL methods on top of desktop OpenGL as well as a browser compliant event model.

NVIDIA announces the dual-chip GeForce GTX 690, powered by two Kepler-generation GK104 graphics processors. With the help of 3072 stream processors, the device is set to establish new performance records. The card supportsOpenGL 4.2, OpenCL 1.2 and DirectX 11.1.

Intel has released the Intel SDK for OpenCL Applications 2012 to support 3rd generation Intel Core processors. Supported seamlessly by the Intel HD Graphics Driver, OpenCL developers can now use compute resources across both the Intel CPU and Intel HD Graphics 4000. The SDK also supports interoperability with graphics and media APIs including Microsoft DirectX, OpenGL, and the Intel Media SDK.

The Khronos Group commenced the opening events of its most recent tour to Beijing and Shanghai. The Khronos Board of Directors, including AMD, Apple, ARM, Epic, Ericsson, Freescale, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, Oracle, Qualcomm, Samsung, SONY and Texas Instruments, has made engaging the participation of Chinese industry a priority and has committed significant financial and staffing resources to Chinese activities. Khronos standards include OpenGL ES, the 3D graphics API used to power the user interface, games and applications on almost every smartphone in the world, OpenCL for heterogeneous parallel computation and WebGL for 3D graphics for HTML5.

The Khronos Group has posted eleven podcasts from the Taiwan Tour. The podcasts cover the official KITE launch on February 16th, and the February 17th DevU. All podcasts are available in both English and Chinese. You can link directly to the podcast page here, or the Khronos feed here. Complete details of the DevU session can be found on the official DevU event page.

Version 0.9.11 of the free open-source, cross-platform 3D application framework PixelLight has been released. We're using OpenGL as well as GLSL within our main-renderer and OpenGL ES 2.0 for Android. Highlight of this release is the new Qt based viewer. This tool makes it possible to inspect complete scenes via the GUI and offers basic edit features for visual debugging. On the renderer side, we've added "Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing" (FXAA) and support for volume texture compression (VTC).